Pauline Kael

“. . . . Perhaps the most damning thing, the thing that made the penniless and once again pregnant Lindy the most hated woman in Australia, was that her stoic, matter-of-fact manner was not what the public expected. TV had accustomed people to grieving mothers who showed their frailty and their naked pathos, and here was Lindy on TV--distanced, impersonal, and bluntly impatient at the endless dumb questions.Error! Reference source not found.

It's this that makes the role work so well for Meryl Streep. She's a perfectionist who works at her roles from the outside in, mastering the details of movement, voice, and facial expression, and this thinking-it-all-out approach gives her an allofness. Of course, she's got the accent; at least, to American ears she's got it--the flatness, the low pitch, and the combative swing of the phrasing. It seems more fully absorbed than her meticulous accents generally do. And she's devised a plain, inelegant walk for this woman who has no time for self-consciousness, and no thought of it, either. The walk may be overdone: the actual Lindy Chamberlain, when she appeared on "60 Minutes," didn't move this heavily, as if she'd just put down a washboard. And Streep definitely overdoes the coiffure--witchy black hair with the bowl cut you sometimes see on little boys. But Streep's Lindy has a consistency--she's practical and unrefined, with no phony aspirations. And what gives the performance power is that Streep can use her own aloofness and make it work in the character. (Even her lack of spontaneity works for her here, though sometimes she does seem overcontrolled.) Streep has psyched out Lindy Chamberlain and seen that her hardness (unconsciously, perhaps) serves a purpose: it saves a part of her from the quizzing and prying of journalists and lawyers. Lindy, who's scrappy and reacts to fools with comic disbelief, needs her impersonal manner to keep herself intact. (Maybe the professionally gracious and intelligent Streep has learned this from her own sessions with reporters and TV interviewers.) [and critics?] From time to time, Streep suggests the strong emotions that Lindy hides in public, and we feel a bond with her--we feel joined to her privacy.

A Cry is never less than gripping . . . . But A Cry is scaled to be a masterwork, and it isn't that. It's more like an expanded, beautifully made TV Movie of the Week. And partly this is because Streep, remarkable as she is (she does some of her finest screen acting), seems to be playing a person in a documentary. This is also true of the very accomplished Sam Neill. Everything that Schepisi does shows integrity, but he doesn't seem to go down deep enough . . . .

Pauline Kael
date? (same as Good Mother)
Movie Love, pp 30-33